NVIDIA's FERMI (GT300): Architected for Tesla, 3 Billion Transistors in 209

NVIDIA astonished us with GT200 tipping the scales at 1.4 billion transistors. Fermi is more than twice that at 3 billion. And literally, that's what Fermi is - more than twice a GT200.

At the high level the specs are simple. Fermi has a 384-bit GDDR5 memory interface and 512 cores. That's more than twice the processing power of GT200 but, just like RV870 (Cypress), it's not twice the memory bandwidth.

[Pandamobile]

That's a lot of transistors :O

[Kakkoii]

Yep, this thing is freaking epic. I'm saving my money up for it. I don't care if it ends up costing $600.

[Major_Tom]

How about waiting to see actual results :S lol.

[Kakkoii]

I've seen all the data I need to see. Unlike you, I have the tech knowledge to understand the specs and features that have been described in Nvidia's released Whitepaper on FERMI.

http://www.nvidia.com/conte...

I'm not just a gamer. I do 3D modeling & animation, and also dabble in programming. A GPU like this is of great interest to me. It's capable of running 32 and 64 bit C++ code, C, FORTRAN, DirectCompute and OpenCL. It also has a 4 fold double precision point calculation speed increase, a long with a new Gigathread feature that should vastly improve multi-threading in the GPU.

And on the GPU side of things, judging by the sheer architecture details, it is going to crush the 5870.

[Major_Tom]

Oh big words and an awful lot of assumptions.

Theoretical peaks are just fine and dandy, much like 3DMAX but real world applications is where it actually gets interesting. I could care less if it's going to crush that 5870 (which is a single GPU anyway).

You're just showing Nvidia fanboy syndrome and that's just fine, albeit hard to measure because many don't exist. I just want this card to be reasonably priced (which might be hard to fathom) so the prices go down. I've read much about it so you don't need to downplay my tech knowledge but instead of getting all defensive and giddy about it, how about you keep your cool, wait for actual comprehensive real world data and reviews.

[Kakkoii]

I am being cool about it. I didn't mean my comment about your knowledge in a derogatory way or with any attitude. I know it probably comes of as if I was attacking you, it's hard to translate attitude into posts sometimes.

The theoretical peak is 8 fold.

What does the 5870 being a single GPU have to do with anything? FERMI is a single GPU also.

[Major_Tom]

It's a cGPU and basically a grade above 5870.

Best quote ever:

"I asked two people at NVIDIA why Fermi is late; NVIDIA's VP of Product Marketing, Ujesh Desai and NVIDIA's VP of GPU Engineering, Jonah Alben. Ujesh responded: because designing GPUs this big is "f*cking hard"."

[Kakkoii]

And the point of that reply is? Doesn't negate the fact it's still a GPU also.

Read the whole AnandTech article if ya haven't already...

And yeah that is an awesome quote.

"Ujesh is wiling to take total blame for GT200. As manager of GeForce at the time, Ujesh admitted that he priced GT200 wrong. NVIDIA looked at RV670 (Radeon HD 3870) and extrapolated from that to predict what RV770's performance would be. Obviously, RV770 caught NVIDIA off guard and GT200 was priced much too high."

This quote brings me good hope for the GT300's price.

[Major_Tom]

It doesn't negate anything you're right but I find it kind of obvious that you're going to see an increase of performance than if it were just a single vanilla gpu without the added affect of being a cGPU.

I'm still very weary about the price Nvidia has a very set range of customers that it attracts and usually those are recurring customers that don't mind high prices for an equal trade of raw power.

I never said that AMDATi is going to have the stronger card, it's just going to come down to price again and Nvidia usually goes above and beyond which is no bad in terms of progression but affordability and accessibility are just as crucial.

If we start seeing 3GB of GDDR5 you know those cards are going to be inaccessible even more so if we see consumer grade 6GB GDDR5 cards.

[Kakkoii]

Well the CPU type calculations won't do much for gaming performance unless developers start offloading their CPU tasks to the GPU. So even if Nvidia removed all the CUDA and CPU operations, it's not not going to effect the gaming performance much. It's the cache heirarchy, threading improvements, GDDR5 and reworked cores that will improve it's game performance.

[Vo_Cal]

Wait for it.................... Kakkoii

Sir you win notadamnthing...
And the other guys gets this pretty reward titled "Doucheofdayear"

**Applause**

[likedamaster]

Funny to see people needing to "take someone down a notch" just because they're overly excited. This is who they aim for... enthusiasts. And who DOESN'T get excited for nVidia's products? The majority does even if they end up settling for an ATI/AMD card because it's cheaper.

[kaveti6616]

Hahaha, even graphics cards have fanboys. What is wrong with this species? Everyone is divided. I'm all for healthy competition but it turns into full on fighting too many times. Well, at least this is just the internet.

[Pandamobile]

There are flash-drive fanboys. GPU fanboys shouldn't be news to you :P

[Pizza]

Now 90% and above PC games are ported from consoles like Xbox360 and PS3. I doubt any game will fully utilizes the power of GT300.

[Kakkoii]

Crysis 2. And trust me, there will be games that will push it. Sure, not a huge amount though. Developers crave more power to further realize their creations. So many short cuts and tricks are used right now to make the games look this good. With more processing power more tools can be implemented to make them even more realistic without so much work. Just you wait and see, it's going to be amazing these next few years.

[badz149]

especially those that pushed the boundaries too much! plus with the heavy piracy on PC, I think more and more dev and publishers will go the "decently looking" games ported from consoles route with the exceptions of just some! we are moving into DX11 now but how many games on PC that can be bragged about to consoles during the DX10 times? Crysis and Crysis Warhead come to mind! and then there's S.T.A.L.K.E.R. and what else? my decent PC with HD4850 and 3GB of RAM is running most games at 1920x1080, 2xAA and mot details to HIGH at at least 30fps. while I need to run Crysis and RE5 at 1280x720 for smooth fps, that doesn't change the fact that not that many games really pushing the boundaries available these days! so...this will again be a waiting game - waiting for the like of Crytek and hopefully many others to push the PC gaming far beyond what consoles are capable of!

[neogeo]

I'm a micro SD kinda guy. say you like any other format and I will flame you to all hell.

[Kakkoii]

@badz149:
If you can only run Crysis at 720p using a 4850, then you must have a CPU bottle neck. Or you have Anti-Aliasing on way to high. What CPU do you have?

As time goes on, the cost to make good looking games goes down because new software is created to ease the creation of good looking graphics. Such as the CryEngine 2/3. To just license the engine instead of creating a whole new one, cuts down majorly on costs.

Also things like tessellation allow easier creation of good looking models. Less worrying and tweaking to try and optimize your models for the game. The games auto adjust the tessellation level according to your computers performance.

Programs like ZBrush are helping make highly detailed models take no time at all. 3D modelers can make a highly detailed finished model in a day with it. Models that used to take over a week in a program like Maya or 3DSMax. And much more organic looking at that.

[badz149]

I've though of that too and no, I set everything on medium. since my rig was initially a 8600GT 512MB GDDR2 and I upgraded to 4850 due to my 8600 melted at the fan clip and somehow totally damaged it, I still use C2D e4500 on a P31 mobo. I know that 4850 is capable of much more but I did say that my PC is 'decent' and I don't wanna spend more for upgrades! games are already expensive as there are and maybe I'll wait for some time before considering updating.

[Kakkoii]

Ok, well searching that model I find it's at 2.2Ghz. That could be a problem. Only 2 cores at 2.2Ghz is pretty low. Have you overclocked it? If not, ya should, that could solve your frame-rate problems. The general stable overclock for that CPU is at about 3.0 - 3.2Ghz. That would increase performance quite a bit. Just Google for some guides on overclocking the e4500, and Core2 Duo's in general.

And if you have overclocked already, then the only thing left I could think of is slow memory or something wrong with your OS.

[badz149]

I kinda scared about OC now that I have a bad experience about it! I think the reason my 8600 crapped out was OC! I tried over-clocking the thing several times (using some guides) but it kept my pc as a whole unstable and always froze after every OC I did and then it just reset back to default speed again. after several tries, I gave up and later I realize that the guide was for GDDR3 but mine was GDDR2 thus the clock is much lower! not long after that, it just stopped working with the melted fan-clip although my pc is highly ventilated. about OC the CPU, I might give it a try but not right now as my HW is CRAP the way it is! believe it or not, I've been getting replacement for my mobo twice and I had 3 memory modules (1GB each) stopped working for unknown reason! I was lucky I got a warranty for 2 of them but the other 1 just gone to waste! even now, when I shut down my PC, my system almost always can't detect my SATA connections...not until I disconnect them all and reconnect them again and will need to go to bios menu to set the HDD boot priority all over again! make me feel tortured everytime I want to restart. haha...maybe this just a useless rant but really, thanks for the sudggestion! I was just playing RE5 just now and at the moment I think I can live with it! +bubbles

[Kakkoii]

Ah that sucks man. Damn OEM's and their crappy motherboards. Next time you want to upgrade your computer I hope ya give building one a shot. If not throw a message my way and I build you one online in your budget for you to put together.

[Pizza]

I'm afraid those dev will be lazy to optimize the PC codes with the power of GT300.

BTW, RE5 PC is really optimized for PC

[il-mouzer]

I'll wait for the benchmark results mostly because I want an XFX version of the card. The architecture is a definitive improvement, will make designing way easier :)

[HypnoticMonkey]

Wow, I still remember being amazed reading how the Cell had 300 million transistors. I can't wait to see what things will be like in 10 years.

[neogeo]

Why have billions of transistors? when you can have........ MILLIONS!?!?